Wind climates in the contiguous USA

Analysis to evaluate RCM simulations of wind climates and the stability/instability of wind energy density

Matrix of coupled Atmosphere-Ocean General Circulation Model (AOGCM, or NCEP reanalysis) and Regional Climate Model (RCM) simulations used to compute mean energy density.

AOGCM ® RCM ¯	NCEP	GFDL	CGCM3	HadCM3
RCM3 (RegCM3)	1979-2000	1979-2000 2041-2062 Dfuture-present	1979-2000 2041-2062 Dfuture-present
CRCM (MRCC)	1979-2000		1979-2000 2041-2062 Dfuture-present
HRM3 (HadRM3)	1979-2000			1979-2000 2041-2062 Dfuture-present

Note the simulations presented herein were conducted under the North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program (NARCCAP). NARCCAP is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Office of Research and Development (EPA).

Full details of this analysis are given in Pryor S.C., Barthelmie R.J. (2011): Assessing climate change impacts on the near-term stability of the wind energy resource over the USA. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108 8167-8171 doi: 10.1073/pnas.1019388108.

The AOGCMs are; GFDL = Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory model (CM2.1) (Delworth et al. 2006), CGCM3 = Canadian model (Scinocca et al. 2008), HadCM3 = Hadley Centre model (Pope et al. 2000).

The RCMs are; RegCM3 = Regional Climate Model 3 used by UC-Santa Cruz (Pal et al. 2007), CRCM = Canadian Regional Climate Model (de Elia & Cote 2010), HRM3 = Third generation Hadley Centre RCM (Jones et al. 2004).

de Elia R., Cote H. (2010) Climate and climate change sensitivity to model configuration in the Canadian RCM over North America. Meteorologische Zeitschrift 19, 325-339

Delworth T.L. et al. (2006) GFDL's CM2 global coupled climate models - Part 1: Formulation and simulation characteristics. Journal of Climate 19, 643-674

Jones R.G. et al. (2004) Generating high resolution climate change scenarios using PRECIS, Met Office Hadley Centre, Exeter, UK

Pal J.S. et al. (2007) Regional climate modeling for the developing world - The ICTP RegCM3 and RegCNET. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 88, 1395-1409

Pope V. et al. (2000) The impact of new physical parameterizations in the Hadley Centre climate model: HadAM3. Climate Dynamics 16, 123-146

Scinocca J.F. et al. (2008) Technical Note: The CCCma third generation AGCM and its extension into the middle atmosphere. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics 8, 7055-7074